Stay on target

I had a blast binge watching the first season of Luke Cage, the latest piece of Marvel’s Netflix Defenders puzzle. Watching the nearly invincible Cage plow his way through mooks was as fun as any Daredevil hallway fight or Captain America kickfest. And equally enjoyable was the show’s choice to name the building said fight takes place in Crispus Attucks, after the first casualty of the American Revolution who like Cage (and like me) was a Black man.

However, as the show went on all those enjoyable elements couldn’t negate my growing dissatisfaction. Luke Cage is full of admirable qualities. It’s authentic and self-aware and socially conscious and delightfully corny. But it falls short of making a strong, definitive argument and point of view on the crucial topics it raises. Luke Cage is a fun half measure.

Full spoilers from here on out.

This piece isn’t about criticizing Luke Cage’s story structure. Like pretty much all Netflix shows it’s too long for the story it has, but there are worse offenders. Rather, this is a criticism of Luke Cage’s frustratingly neutral politics. And if you don’t think politics belong in a discussion of a show about a bulletproof Black dude I really don’t know what to tell you.

Here’s a little question that’s totally not loaded at all. According to Luke Cage (the show and the character) what is the single biggest threat facing African-Americans in the year of our lord 2016? The show traces Cage’s journey from quiet loner to community superhero. But what is Luke Cage the Defender actually defending Harlem and its rich Black history from? Is it the police? Which part of the police? The system or individual corrupt cops? Is it Black gangsters and their Black huckster politician cousins? Is it Puerto Rican gangster interlopers? Is it the personal failings of Black parents like hypocritical preacher fathers or overbearing Black mobster mothers? Is it gentrification? Or is it superpowered Snake Men?

The answer is all of the above. But instead of being an examination of interlocking systems of oppression in institutions, the show just gestures towards these issues without really committing to a firm stance on any of them. It borrows plenty of texture, and actors, from The Wire, but not enough of the actual thoughtfulness.

That’s a shame because the texture is great. It’s a low bar to clear, but this is a show about Black people that feels like it was made by Black people. Showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker loads the show with potent symbols. Whether it’s Cottonmouth’s Biggie Smalls picture, Cage’s copy of Ellison’s Invisible Man, shots that feel straight out of a Spike Lee movie, barbershop talk, eulogies at the Black church, bootleg copies of Avengers footage being sold on the street, or the show’s excellent use of music in the nightclub setting and beyond, Luke Cage doesn’t feel fake.

Conversations about the Celtics or the Wu-Tang Clan sometimes feel canned, like you can literally see the plot stopping so characters can “Shoot The Shit,” but overall Harlem feels pleasingly naturalistic, unlike Daredevil’s absurd take on Hell’s Kitchen. Luke Cage is so unapologetically, authentically Black I’m curious to know how white fanboys who only watched it because of Avengers connections or whatever reacted to it.

But the show fails to fully make an artistic statement as coherent and realized as the works it cloaks itself in. And I’m still not sure why. The show certainly recognizes and acknowledges the real-world issues and history it parallels. There’s a scene where Method Man straight-up goes on the radio to rap about how dope Luke Cage, a bulletproof Black guy, is. But why is Cage so dope? Why is that imagery so powerful?

Well, it’s because innocent Black people keep getting shot to death. But why and who’s doing it? Spoilers: it’s the police. Or rather, the instances Cage’s bullet-riddled hoodie directly reference involve the police, not random gangster shootouts and certainly not showdowns with supervillains.

Unfortunately, at times it feels like Luke Cage goes out of it’s way to avoid being even vaguely anti-cop. Cage is a good misunderstood ex-cop. Misty Knight (and her silky smooth voice) is a good cop who’s mistake is not trusting the system enough. The bad cops aren’t racists but rather pawns of minority gangsters.

Cage was framed and sent to jail by a revenge-obsessed villain, not the police state. The cops only hate Cage when they think he killed one of them, and a big plot point involves the cops being manipulated by the Black villains like a bunch of suckers.

Let’s talk some more about the villains. Theo Rossi as Shades is a great perceptive goon. Mahershala Ali’s conflicted Cottonmouth is surprisingly tragic, and Erik LaRay Harvey as arms dealers/smooth-talking preacher Diamondback brings a lot of the schlock Blaxploitation fun the show maybe could’ve used more of.

However the MVP for me is Alfre Woodard as Mariah Dillard, and not just because she’s freakishly similar to how my mom would be if she were a supervillain. Her arc from idealistic politician to crime boss in a lot of ways feels like Kingpin’s story in Daredevil or Walter White in Breaking Bad. A bad person in denial slowly takes responsibility for and even begins to revel in their badness.

Mariah is a strong character, and that’s great, but the most insidious thing about her is something I’m not sure the show even recognizes. Mariah, a murderous villain, is the only character on the show to use Black Lives Matter rhetoric. At first, she uses it in her righteous enough plan to curb gentrification through her New Harlem Renaissance Project. “Keep Harlem Black, ” she says right before cameras stop rolling and she recoils from the children.

But later her use of the phrase is as disingenuous as some deplorable folks on Twitter think the phrase is in reality. As part of her and Diamondback’s plan to stop Cage, Mariah holds a rally. Diamondback literally tells her to “Get your Al Sharpton on.” At the rally, she uses a photo of a young Black boy assaulted by the police to stir outrage. However, Mariah then calls for the police to gain even more power? To protect normal police from superpowered freaks?

The messaging becomes so muddled. Diamondback makes the scary, accurate point that fear of Black people has encouraged a lot of rash actions in America, and he’s trying to stoke that fear for his advantage. He wants to sell special anti-Cage bullets to the police. There’s a great scene where attorney Blake Tower, who has been made Black in the MCU, cautions against militarizing the police. He even references The Punisher. But the show mixes up actual racism with the trope of “superpowers as a metaphor for racism.”

This works in something like the X-Men movies or even Zootopia (although coding minorities as literal dangerous predators is a little questionable.) But in the MCU what makes superheroes like The Avengers beloved saviors while superheroes like Luke Cage are hated freaks? And honestly, conflating irrational fear of Black people with the relatively rational fear of people with superpowers isn’t the best move either.

It’s little choices like these that slowly undercut the powerful, cathartic idea of a bulletproof Black man. Cage is not struggling primarily because he lives under a racist system, he’s being targeted by other bad Black people because he is a superhero. That’s fine; I’m not saying the show should be a polemic or that Black people should never be villains. But this is what makes the show just a superhero show with cool and relevant Black iconography, not a show making a strong statement about the current Black experience through a superheroic lens. It’s a subtle but important difference.

For a while, I thought the flashbacks to Luke’s time in prison would be the exception to this underlying incoherence. In these scenes, Luke is a normal Black dude forced to fight by racist white prison guards and experimented on by uncaring white scientists. That’s pretty clear cut. But then there are the therapy sessions where Reva Connors asks prisoners to accept responsibility for their actions, to see the system’s point of view because you gotta hear both sides. Even Cage, who is completely innocent, admits that he’s probably done something that he deserves to be in jail for.

Finally, it’s revealed that Reva, a Black woman and Cage’s dead wife, was one of the true masterminds behind the conspiracy against him in prison. Sure this gives Cage an excuse to hook up with Claire Temple guilt-free, a relationship I don’t quite buy despite Rosario Dawson’s fine performance, but it’s another example of the show’s noncommittal stance on what the true threats and enemies are.

Justin Charity over at The Ringer wrote a piece called “Luke Cage, Black Conservative.” I wouldn’t go that far in my assessment, it’s not like Jason Whitlock created the show, but the article does touch on Cage’s old-school and paternal almost to the point of condescending takes on topics like how a man should dress and talk, including the use of the N-word.

“Cage dates himself with stale concerns… Any other uptown native might’ve been quicker to discover that Harlem’s greater, untouchable menace is the NYPD. But what, Luke Cage wonders, about black-on-black crime?”

To go back to the question of what are the actual threats facing Black people, at times it sounds like bad language is high on the list in this universe. But while Cage is celebrated for his distaste for the word, with Mariah it’s just another example of her hollow and hypocritical respectability politics. So which is it? Again, Luke Cage doesn’t really have an answer.

Luke Cage the show’s messy desire to be everything to the point of being nothing is crystallized in the character of Cage himself. Mike Colter has charm and physicality to spare, but not even the most magical negro imaginable could carry the weight of all these traits. Cage is respectable and a ladies man and strong and cool and corny and witty and quippy and meditative and humble and confident and low-key and over-the-top and loving and Luke Cage and Carl Lucas and a fighter but a reluctant one. Black people, like people, contain multitudes. Black characters should be complex and well-rounded. Just look at recent shows like Atlanta and Insecure. But Cage is forced to be so much it robs him of a core self, which could be interesting if that loss of identity was the show’s point but that’s not really the case. In the comics, Cage was Power Man, the Hero for Hire who sold his services. It was a neat twist on the genre and made the character something more than just a straightforward good guy. But while hiring Cage is joked about, on the show, the idea is jettisoned faster than Cage’s tiara and yellow shirt, presumably because it would lessen his honest heroism.

As far as how the show attempts to adapt the rest of Cage’s comic canon, it sort of tries to have it both ways again. Luke Cage the comic was basically a printed Blaxploitation movie. To properly film it as a movie now you’d basically have to do a parody period piece like Black Dynamite. Luke Cage doesn’t do that. It’s thoroughly modern with references to Nicki Minaj and President Obama (who maybe only served one term in the MCU?). But every so often it throws in a moment or a sound cue of 1970s schlock straight out of that era.

It’s moments like Diamondback blasting Cage into the back of a garbage truck, Cage getting dipped in acid multiple times, and Cage trashing a barn like he was Charles Foster Kane. It’s characters shouting dialogue like “Don’t call me Cottonmouth!” or “Sweet Christmas!” with complete sincerity. It’s a riot, but it’s infrequent enough that it feels a little jarring every time it crops up in an otherwise grounded crime action show. It’s another half measure. This is why I think some viewers have a problem with Diamondback. He’s living in that retro universe all the time while the show only exists there part of the time, to its detriment. In fact, if Luke Cage had fully committed to being some kind of neo-Blaxploitation piece, that would have made me forgive its seeming lack of an actual point. Tons of Blaxploitation movies borrowed relevant Black issues and wove them into their absurd urban escapades on a whim. The word “exploitation” is right there. But Luke Cage feels like it wants to have a point or it think that it does. It’s in a No Man’s Land between schlock and art.

The show’s admittedly effective ending shows Luke Cage and his allies defeating the villain but then being defeated by the system. Cage gives an impassioned speech about Harlem as a symbol of Black Excellence. It’s great stuff, but it’s platitudes. What is it about the system that victimizes Cage and people like him specifically? What are the actual problems facing the Black people of Harlem and how do we solve them besides the vague idea of being good to each other? Beyond legitimate concerns and good intentions, what is the show definitively trying to say about any of this?

If you think I’m being harsh about a comic book show, I’d argue that the show invites this kind of critique by explicitly presenting these political issues. And I appreciate that it even goes as far as it does. But it is possible to go further, and in fact one of its sweet sister shows already did.

The first season of Jessica Jones suffers from pacing and casting and logic issues, but as far as crafting a superhero narrative that makes a coherent artistic point, it’s second to none. All of the choices, from the characters (including a less prominent but more consistent Cage himself) and their actions to the plotting to the mood, serve the central theme of trauma and its after-effects. The show is making clear arguments about the different, sometimes sadly self-destructive, ways trauma impacts people and how people traumatize others. And focusing in on the specific traumatic experience of being a female victim of sexual assault and the resulting loss of agency (a metaphor augmented and made literal by but not substituted with super powers) heightens the power of that frank and adult message. Luke Cage goes for something broader, but it fumbles its chances to deliver a statement that direct despite the numerous opportunities. Meanwhile Daredevil gets a pass because what deeper meaning could reasonably expect besides Catholic Guilt?

For what it’s worth I don’t think the Black Panther movie will suffer from this problem. The character works better outside of the point in time he was created in, and the fantasy elements give the filmmakers some distance to safely address real issues. Just read the current run by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Plus, director Ryan Coogler’s last two films Fruitvale Station and Creed prove he knows how to deliver coherent artistic racial themes in both serious examinations of police brutality and feel-good boxing movies starring Sylvester Stallone. So a Black African cat king shouldn’t present a huge challenge.

One of the best arguments for increased minority representation in the media is that if there were more diverse shows, there would be fewer impossible and unfair expectations placed on the diverse shows that do exist. If there were an increased array of Black superhero shows, maybe Luke Cage wouldn’t feel pressured to stretch itself thin serving disparate masters united only by skin color, straining to appear complex and multifaceted in a way it can’t fully back up.

Luke Cage has killer action and a comforting feel I wanted to devour like soul food. And it does offer up real ideas about the police and white supremacy and just how inspiring the sight of a bulletproof Black man really would be. But whether it’s because the creators weren’t up to the task, weren’t interested, or weren’t allowed to by Marvel, I finished Luke Cage unsure of the show’s opinions on these topics it was thinking about. Luke Cage sells a great communal vibe, I just wish it had a stronger singular vision to match.